LETTER: Driverless cars not ready for in Newton streets

Wednesday

Apr 25, 2018 at 3:20 PMApr 25, 2018 at 3:20 PM

To the editor:

One Sunday evening last month, an autonomous vehicle with an emergency backup driver crashed into a woman who was pushing her bike across a bone-dry, ruler-straight, traffic-free road in Tempe, Arizona, killing her. Here in Newton, we have heavily trafficked streets, highly variable weather, plenty of pedestrians crossing busy commercial corridors, and bicyclists vying for space on our potholed roadways. All of this makes me wonder why Newton’s director of transportation, Nicole Freedman, is so eager to invite this precarious technology to be tested in our city.

To say that driverless technology is unproven is an understatement. Cars like the one that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe are loaded up with LIDAR (Light-Detection and Ranging), radar, cameras, and GPS systems, yet they still can’t be counted on to avoid a large, slow-moving object like a pedestrian pushing a bicycle. One expert commented on how difficult it is to distinguish a pedestrian from a bush or a paper bag. Do we really want these highly experimental vehicles roaming our streets?

I would encourage Ms. Freedman to focus on making our streets safer – not more precarious – for our drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists. However alluring autonomous vehicles may be, the time to welcome them onto our streets has not arrived.